woOd began with the question: what if we take wood as material and a space for story and looked at it through the lens of transformation? What can the woods teach us about who we are?
We went to the woods - of our pasts, of myth and of Epping Forest - to study, embody and imagine how its stories reflect our own.
These images and scenarios emerged between the performers in improvisation: a passage of episodes that explore innocence, fear and transformation.
We sought out people who have found refuge in the woods, while reading the myths, stories and fairytales that affected transformations. We began examining the breakdown of such stories and the refracted and broken cycles of communication that reflect our contemporary world. In an attempt to respond to a time of nonsense and narrative breakdown we return to the childish basics of theatre: fairytale, mask, dance, song and chorus.
What continues to emerge is a broken land of wood, creature and human in which gestures of refuge, care, illness and violence merge in a dance of death that plays us back the fragments of the wood. The wood, then, becomes our increasingly toxic, magic and violent time, asking us what it means to be wholly human while a part of nature.
Cast
Oleksandra Barstok
Jonah Buksbaum
Emma Yvette Conlon
Inge Crafford Lazarus
Will Choy Edelson
Marianna Fornari
Georgia Gabrielides
Tara Kitson
Nash Nørgaard
Creative Team
Co-creator|Direction Simon Gleave
Co-creator Korina Kokkali
Lighting Designer Matt Leventhall
Sound Designer Hattie North
Photography Elliot Pritchard
photo by RADA
photo by RADA